John Wilson Croker’s Image of France in the Quarterly Review David Morphet Introduction Political developments in France provided a substantial topic for British periodicals during the first half of the nineteenth century. The most sustained comment came from the Rt Hon. John Wilson Croker, the principal contributor to the Quarterly Review (QR) on political matters over the period. His thirty or so articles on France published up to 1851 constitute a significant part of his total QR output, and are the main focus of this paper. 1 Consideration will also be given to a number of articles on France which appeared during this period in the Edinburgh Review (ER) , Fraser’s Magazine (FM) and the Westminster Review (WR) . All of these were published under the ruling convention of anonymity. Within four or five years of its foundation in 1802, the ER began to attack the policies of the Tory government. By 1809, it had sharpened its attack to include the evacuation of British forces from Corunna, the debacle of the Walcheren Campaign, and the scandal over the sales of Army commissions by the Duke of York’s mistress. The QR was founded in that year to counter the ER , and achieved a rapid success. Its first editor, William Gifford, estimated in 1812 that it was read by ‘at least 50,000 of that class whose opinions it is most important to render favourable, and whose judgment it is most expedient to set right’. 2 Its founders included the publisher John Murray and Sir Walter Scott, whose son-in-law J. G. Lockhart became editor in 1822. Croker was involved with the QR from the beginning. His closeness to senior Tory figures was such that ‘at his peak, [he] was essential to the political survival of the Quarterly ’. 3 He was proud of his influence, believing for instance that an article in the issue of June 1841 had been regarded as a ‘kind of Conservative manifesto […] frequently referred to [… ] by candidates on the hustings’. He told Sir Robert Peel that the QR was a ‘kind of direction post to a large body of people [… ] its chief use is to keep our friends in a right course and to furnish them with arguments in support of their opinions’. 4 1 A complete list of all Croker’s contributions to the QR on all subjects can be found in W. E. Houghton et al. (eds.), Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals , vol. i (Toronto, 1966), pp. 861-2 2 Myron Brightfield, John Wilson Croker (Cambridge, 1940), p. 420. For more recent evaluations of Croker, see William Thomas, The Quarrel of Macaulay and Croker: Politics and History in the Age of Reform (Oxford, 2000) and Robert Portsmouth, John Wilson Croker: Irish Ideas and the Invention of Modern Conservatism (Dublin, 2010). 3 Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The ‘Edinburgh’ and the ‘Quarterly’ in the Early Victorian Age (Leicester, 1989), p. 68. 4 Add. MS. 40502: letter of 20 Feb. 1842. 1 eBLJ 2012, Article 1 John Wilson Croker’s Image of France in the Quarterly Review As France gradually reasserted herself after the Napoleonic Wars, relations with Britain were often strained (over Belgium in 1830, the Near East in 1840, and the Spanish Marriages in 1846). At other times there was a measure of entente, and in 1854 France and Britain were allies in the Crimean War. These vicissitudes coloured Croker’s writing on France in the QR but were not his primary concern, which was the domestic political situation in France, and in particular the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. He constantly feared, not least in the period leading to the 1832 Reform Bill, that British politics would suffer contagion from the influence of French revolutionary tradition. Croker and France Croker, born in 1780, came from a Protestant Irish background, and trained as a lawyer. As a boy, he was strongly affected by the French Revolution and learned of the Terror from émigrés who taught him French. In 1798 he was a university student in Dublin when rebellion in Ireland was briefly supported by a commando raid from France. He had family connections with Edmund Burke, whose critique of the French Revolution was one of the seminal works of the age. Following the 1801 Act of Union he won a Parliamentary seat at Westminster as a protégé of the Duke of Wellington, then Chief Secretary for Ireland. During his absence in the Peninsular Wars, Wellington asked him to manage Irish business in the House of Commons. He made a strong mark, and was appointed Secretary to the Admiralty in 1809. Remaining in that post till 1830, he was close to the centre of Government during the last five years of the Napoleonic Wars, and throughout the fifteen years of the Bourbon Restoration. He visited Paris after Waterloo, when he discussed with Castlereagh, Wellington, Talleyrand and others ‘the best method of laying hold of Napoleon’. 5 He prided himself on his knowledge of French affairs. He had a special connection with France through his father-in-law, a member of the British consular service based in France, and through his son-in-law, the British Consul in Brest. He regularly took Paris newspapers, and visited Paris when he could. Over the years, he assembled extensive collections of original printed documents from the French Revolution – a total of over 48,000 items – which are held in the British Library. 6 In 1831, he famously took issue with Macaulay on the causes of the French Revolution during the Commons debates on the Reform Bill. 7 He visited Paris with his friend Sir Robert Peel in 1837, on which occasion he called on Marat’s aged sister, and on Chateaubriand, who recalled this visit in his memoirs. He called on Louis Philippe during his exile in England after 1848, making notes of his calls, and began a correspondence with Louis Philippe’s minister Guizot which lasted well into the 1850s. The articles on France which he wrote for the QR can be considered under four main heads: the French Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath; the eighteen-year July Monarchy of Louis Philippe; French drama and the French novel in the 1830s; and the Revolution of 1848 and the rise of Louis Napoleon. 5 Louis J. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers. Correspondence and Diaries of the late Rt Hon. John Wilson Croker , 3 vols (London, 1884), vol. i, p. 327. 6 See Audrey C. Brodhurst, ‘The French Revolution Collections in the British Library’, British Library Journal , ii (1976), pp. 138-58 7 See William Thomas, op. cit. 2 eBLJ 2012, Article 1 John Wilson Croker’s Image of France in the Quarterly Review I. Articles on the French Revolution In his day, Croker was widely regarded as the leading British authority on the events of the French Revolution and was more than once urged to write its history. In 1816, John Murray offered him £2,500 for an ‘Annals of the Revolution’. Some years later, Peel suggested that he write an ‘Encyclopaedia of the Revolution’. Several of his QR articles on the Revolution were eventually brought together in a separate volume, on which he was working up to his death. 8 As a historian, he was particular to the point of obsession about details of time and place, his approach being essentially forensic and political. He sought detail in order to reveal and rebut, and clinch his case. He ‘regularly went in for the kill with a blunderbuss effect’. 9 In his articles he confronted, as prosecuting counsel, those whom he saw as falsifiers of the truth, whether politicians or historians. The jury to which he appealed were the readers of the QR , the wider British public, and posterity. As the years passed following the Reform Bill, fear of revolution in Britain receded; but this did not lead him to abandon either his mission or his method. A case in point is his critique in the QR of September 1845 of Thiers’s Histories of the Revolution and the Napoleonic period. The fact that much of this work had already been available for several years did not deter him. He proclaimed his intention ‘to demolish utterly and irretrievably Thiers’s credit as a historian’. After numerous illustrations in forensic style, he concluded that he had ‘proved […] a deliberate case of fraud and falsehood’, that he had shown the works to be grossly distorted, and that their purpose was not to reflect historical fact, but ‘to electrify France with a galvanic exhibition of Bonaparte’s glory’. In his own historical work, he sought the explanation of events in personal motive rather than social and economic circumstance. Although he could bring himself to acknowledge that the Revolution was ‘hailed at its dawn with universal enthusiasm’ and that ‘large and deep reform was desirable and inevitable’, he believed that this could and should have been achieved within the existing constitution, and that enthusiasm for reform was misappropriated by self-serving individuals who used ‘gangs of malefactors and murderers’ in order to gain power. Revolution was far from being the result of an irresistible march of events. It sprang from conspiracy by a small group of journalists and propagandists. Had he accepted (as did the ER from its early years) that events such as the French Revolution result from complex social and economic causes, he would have been led into what he would certainly have regarded as inopportune speculation as to whether similar factors were at work in Britain – or Ireland for that matter. In an article in the QR of March 1844 entitled ‘The Revolutionary Tribunals’, Croker wrote: Our object will have been attained […] if we can awaken the attention of the general reader to the great truth with which the whole Revolution is pregnant – that the direct intervention of what is called the people – which in Revolutionary language means nothing but the demagogues and the populace – in the actual government of a country, can produce nothing but miserable anarchy, of which blood and plunder are the first fruits, and despotism the ultimate and not unwelcome result and remedy.